Hey Friend!
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Happy Wednesday and welcome to another Wake Up Wednesday!
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In case you've missed the good news, I published a book about our true nature. (Fear not, it's not too late.)

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Okay, enough promotion. Let's see what I have to say today.

Life Is Never About Improving Yourself, Only About Accepting Yourself 🤍

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For a long time, I unknowingly believed that the goal was to fix all the aspects of myself I deemed less than acceptable. (This is what the whole self-improvement market rests on.)

In short, I tried to perfect myself.

I was convinced I could only truly accept myself after I had improved myself enough.

This behavior placed the key to accepting myself outside myself feeding a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. And no matter how much I tried, it was never enough, of course.

Imagine the shock (which you might have experienced yourself) when I saw that the thing I was trying to improve wasn’t really there in the first place.

Afterward, my faults didn’t all disappear. I didn’t become a better human.

Instead, acceptance happened. Finally, I could accept myself as I am including the habitual emotions that are an echo of misidentification.

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Acceptance of who we are is what we want.

No matter if we chase wealth, fame, sex, or enlightenment, we’re doing it because we think we need this to accept ourselves, to be whole, complete, fulfilled, or whatever.

Living an awake life means accepting what is as it is, including this seemingly imperfect you. Or as Anthony De Mello said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”

When you can accept what is even a little bit more, everything becomes so much easier.

Notice how much of our problems are based on the premise that something about us is not okay.

Now imagine removing that premise.

How much lighter would you feel?

An elephant-sized burden would be lifted off your poor back.

Yes, healing yourself from emotional wounds is all fine and dandy but guess what is at the core of our never-ending healing endeavor?

The idea that who we are as humans is not-okay, unlovable, unworthy, unacceptable.

If we discard that idea then it’s no longer a matter of healing ourselves to reach some better persona. Then it's simply a matter of welcoming all facets of our experience. And that is the healing.

You don't need to endlessly improve yourself to accept yourself. You can accept yourself right now exactly as you are. If you think you can’t then that’s a belief to examine.

Step out of the paradigm of something being wrong with you.

I know this is not easy for most of us. But the moment we accept ourselves, so much of this frantic activity we do because we believe we are unworthy falls away.

If all your habits and goals were an expression of self-rejection, it might be possible that all of them drop away.

Whatever habits you build afterward will then be an expression of acceptance not of rejection. You might still go to the gym but now you no longer do it because you think you must. You do it because you enjoy it.

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If we become fixated on healing an imagined character we not only tend to identify more with this never-good-enough character we also create more problems.

We start imagining problems where there were none before.

Suddenly you're convinced your shyness is a problem and try hard to fix it. All the while this shyness was part of your mysterious charm that attracted the right people into your life.

You might know this already but it's still useful to remind yourself of this.

This life you’re living has nothing to do with living up to some kind of behavioral ideal. It has nothing to do with being “perfect” whatever that means.

No one acts perfectly (by whose standard?) all the time. At least no one I've ever heard of. Not even the all-so-equanimous-seeming spiritual gurus.

You might have a time when nothing outrageous happens in your life. You're just peaceful most of the time and everything unfolds smoothly.

You might think that this means something great. You start to perceive yourself as a super spiritual success.

But then something happens that triggers some deep-seated conditioning. Emotions you have almost forgotten flood to the surface.

Perhaps shame, perhaps anger, perhaps fear.

Happens to us all.

Then what?

Then you do the only thing that you can do.

You open the door and give it all your unconditional attention. And you can only really do that when you understand that nothing is wrong with any of the content of your experience.

There is quite literally nothing wrong with your experience. Not even thoughts saying, “There’s something wrong with my experience,” are wrong.

Let this into your heart.

There is nothing wrong with my experience. Nothing can ever be wrong. Wrongness is an absolute impossibility.

This is not a moral statement. This is a plain observation.

Wrong means something along the lines of, “This shouldn’t be.” But there is no “shouldn’t be.”

Accept yourself and “shouldn’t be” will disappear.

Feeling Your Feelings ❔

I received a question recently from a reader about "feeling your feelings." In a nutshell, it was about how to do it and what it feels like.

I struggled with this for a long time and assume this is a point of confusion for many people. So I want to share the answer I gave in the hopes that more people can benefit from it.

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The first thing I would say is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Sometimes you hear a description that makes sense and it clicks.

But an important thing to keep in mind is that the mind can and often does criticize everything. And it will criticize you for not being "good" at feeling your feelings.

So you actually don't need to stop analyzing or thinking, that's just what minds do. Instead, while the analyzing or wrangling with emotions is happening you can ask yourself what that feels like, and pay attention to how it feels in the body. The struggle/fight is just another layer that can be felt.

Another helpful point to keep in mind is to not approach feeling your feelings with the intention of ridding yourself of them. That just creates more subtle resistance and rejection towards the feelings and easily leads to, "I have been feeling my feelings why are they still there?"

What has helped me a lot, especially with difficult emotions, is talking to emotions and treating them like life forms. I would, for example, say: "Welcome shame. My door is open for you. You can stay as long as you like and I'll give you all the unconditional attention you want." That alone can reduce resistance immensely.

Imagine you have a child who comes home from school and you can see the child is feeling ashamed but doesn't want to talk about it, you wouldn't get angry at the child and demand that he or she stop being ashamed in five minutes from now. Instead, you hold the child, give it love, and assure it that it's okay.

In the end, a lot comes down to realizing that nothing about your experience, not even the really uncomfortable feelings, is wrong. It all just wants to be seen, to receive some unconditional attention. And all the recurring feelings, specifically the ones that hurt most, are usually the ones that have been starved of this attention for a long time. So they might need a little more attention.

And finally, in my experience, it also makes sense to nurture feelings you do want, like peace, joy, gratitude, etc.

Often negative feelings are more habitual to us than positive ones and that's why they're so persistent — we have practiced them a lot. But we can choose to feel the emotions we want and if we do that regularly, they become a bigger part of our lives. Then at some point instead of always automatically moving toward negative thoughts and emotions, our attention automatically starts moving toward the positive more often.

Seek Not This Dream 💤

I stumbled upon a beautiful piece of art recently and I think you might enjoy this.
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Quote 📜​

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Endnote 🎬

​I hope you enjoyed this issue of the Wake Up Wednesday. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.​
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Much Love,

Luka

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PS Do you want to challenge your self to unlock an intuitive way of life? If so then check out my ebook: 101 Steps For Transformation​

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